A colloquial term describing a software program's reaction to an incomprehensible state.

In an operating system context, a panic is usually a system call, triggered by an unexpected state, that causes the system to abruptly stop executing. This is intended to reduce the possibility that the cause of the panic will cause further damage to the system, applications, or data and hopefully to preserve the system in a viable enough state that it can store debugging information in a safe place for analysis once it has come back up.

Presentation of the usable storage capacity of a disk or array to an operating environment in the form of several virtual disks whose aggregate capacity approximates that of the underlying physical or virtual disk.

Partitioning is common in MS-DOS, Windows, and UNIX environments. Partitioning is useful with hosts that cannot support the full capacity of a large disk or array as one device. It can also be useful administratively, for example, to create hard subdivisions of a large virtual disk.

The process of reliably and provably eliminating the ability, to a given level of assurance, to discover, recover, and read from digital media.

This process has two phases. The first phase is identifying all of the instances (including the physical locations) of the data to be deleted regardless of where it is located; the second phase is permanently destroying all traces of the data. Depending on the level of assurance required, complete physical destruction of the media may be necessary. Seedata shredding.

A synonym for non-volatility, usually used to distinguish between data and metadata held in DRAM, which is lost when electrical power is lost, and data held on non-volatile storage (disk, tape, battery-backed DRAM, etc.) that survives, or persists across power outages.

The SNIA uses the base 10 convention commonly found in I/O-related and scientific literature rather than the base 2 convention (1,125,899,906,842,624, i.e., 250) common in computer system and software literature.

The SNIA uses the base 10 convention commonly found in I/O-related and scientific literature rather than the base 2 convention (1,125,899,906,842,624, i.e., 250) common in computer system and software literature.

Platforms include all end devices that are attached to a Fabric, for example, hosts and storage subsystems. Platforms communicate with other platforms in the storage area network using the facilities of a Fabric or other topology

A fully usable copy of a defined collection of data that contains an image of the data as it appeared at a single instant in time.

A PIT copy is considered to have logically occurred at that point in time, but implementations may perform part or all of the copy at other times (e.g., via database log replay or rollback) as long as the result is a consistent copy of the data as it appeared at that point in time. Implementations may restrict point in time copies to be read-only or may permit subsequent writes to the copy. Three important classes of point in time copies are split mirror, changed block, and concurrent. Pointer remapping and copy on write are implementation techniques often used for the latter two classes. See snapshot.

Location within the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure where data are encrypted on its way to storage (3.43) and, conversely, where data are decrypted when accessed from storage.[ISO/IEC 27040]

A technique for maintaining a point in time copy in which pointers to all of the source data and copy data are maintained.

When data is overwritten, a new location is chosen for the updated data, and the pointer for that data is remapped to point to it. If the copy is read-only, pointers to its data are never modified. See Copy on Write.

Goals are the objectives or desired state intended to be maintained by a policy system.

As the highest level of abstraction of policy, these goals are most directly described in business rather than technical terms. For example, a goal might state that a particular application operate on a network as though it had its own dedicated network, despite using a shared infrastructure. 'Policy goals' can include the objectives of a service level agreement, as well as the assignment of resources to applications or individuals. A policy system may be created that automatically strives to achieve a goal through feedback regarding whether the goal (such as a service level) is being met.

In a perfect world, any power required to keep the power supply within specified operating temperature limits would be included in the calculation. In this one, the convention to measure efficiency without it saves much work and controversy.

A user who, by virtue of function or seniority, has been allocated powers within a system that are significantly greater than those available to the majority of users.

Such persons will include, for example, the system administrator(s), storage administrator(s), and network administrator(s) who are responsible for keeping the system available and may need powers to create new user profiles as well as add to or amend the powers and access rights of existing users.

A value in the Association_Header that identifies a process or a group of processes within a node.

Communicating processes in different nodes use Process-Associators to address each other. Originating processes have Originator Process-Associators; responding processes have Responder Process_Associators.

An I/O interconnect (either a host I/O interconnect or a device I/O interconnect) whose transmission characteristics and protocols are the intellectual property of a single vendor, and require the permission of that vendor to be implemented in the products of other vendors.

1. A class of sanitization that makes recovery infeasible using state of the art laboratory techniques, but which preserves the storage media in a potentially reusable state. [ISO/IEC 27040]

2. The process of returning a solid state storage device to a state in which subsequent writes execute, as closely as possible, as if the device had never been used and does not contain any valid data. See FOB.